


Lost in a City

by imkerfuffled



Series: 25 Days of Ficlet Prompts [21]
Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), but takes place after they join back together to fight hydra, so far tony and bruce only appear in ch 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-15 03:20:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4591041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint and Natasha are investigating a Hydra cell in Latveria when they are captured by the very people they’re looking into. But escaping isn’t the issue, it’s how to get home afterwards that proves difficult.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Okay, This Looks Bad

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where they are captured and the author uses a cheap writing trick to establish setting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I re-read the last few issues of Fraction's Hawkeye before going over this chapter for revision, and now that second line is giving me unintentional feelings.
> 
> Also, Doomstadt is the capital of Latveria, for those like me who had to look it up.

_Plink._

The noise hit Clint’s ears like one of his own arrows.

_Plink. Plink._

His face twitched. He was going for a wince, but he didn’t quite make it.

The notion popped into his head that he might have been unconscious for an extended period of time, and maybe that was why his head felt like it had been stepped on by the Hulk.

_Plink. Plink. Plink._

Funny, he didn’t remember getting drunk last night. Or falling asleep on a cold, wet rock. Or going anywhere where cold, wet rocks were considered viable replacements for beds.

 _Aw futz,_ he thought, _Not again._

“Tasha,” he tried to groan. It came out more like, “Uhssah.”

The answering groan came from his right. Left? Right. No, from his right. “Wudappend?”

“Kidnapped,” Clint said, working hard to not slur his speech, “I think.”

Natasha spat something crude in Russian.

With another groan, Clint blinked his eyes open to see Natasha a few feet away from him, levering herself into a sitting position. Clint quickly did the same. He shook his head to clear away some of the leftover fuzziness in his mind.

As he looked around, his eyes began adjusting to the dim lighting, and he could pick out more of their surroundings. The room they were being held in was small and square shaped, with concrete floors and walls and a cracked ceiling that dripped water next to Clint’s ear. He glared up at it just for good measure, as it continued its periodic _plink plinking._ What little light they had to see by filtered in through a tiny, clouded window set high in the door. It was just transparent enough to let in light, but not enough to let anyone see out.

Clint gave himself a quick pat down to check for any hidden weapons their captors might have missed, but found nothing. His phone had been taken too, as well as his second hearing aids and the emergency aspirin in his pocket. Beside him, Natasha mimicked his moves, finally ending her search with a peek down her front for her fourth backup knife. She shook her head at Clint.

“Perverts,” Clint whispered, “I hate it when they’re thorough.”

“At least we still have our clothes,” Natasha whispered back.

“Aw, Nat, that was _one time_.”

Natasha smirked and tapped her fingers twice on the floor: their code for a spot check on the situation, both to asses any memory loss from whatever they were drugged with, and to plan their next moves.

Clint replied in the same way, by tapping it out on the floor using their own shorthand Morse code. “ _We were in Latveria tracking a faction of Hydra.”_

 _“They were smuggling weapons through Doomstadt,”_ Natasha added, _“We found their base at the old factory.”_

 _“Which turned out to be a trap, and they drugged us,”_ tapped Clint, “ _Now I remember.”_

 _“Where did they take us?”_ Natasha asked, squinting to find even the slightest clue around her that could lead them to the answer.

 _“No idea,”_ Clint shrugged, “ _You remember anything else?”_

_“I think we were supposed to send Cap a report at five.”_

_“Oops.”_


	2. Just Gotta Get Out, Just Gotta Get Right Outta Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where they bust out. Queen soundtrack optional.

It took six hours by Natasha’s estimation for anyone to check in on them. In that time, forty-seven minutes were spent planning, twenty-three searching for video cameras and other surveillance equipment in the room (two cameras, marginal blind spot near the door), which left four hours and fifty-two minutes for Clint to sing the entirety of Bohemian Rhapsody over and over in his head. He became thoroughly sick of the song by the fifteenth round through, and by the thirty-second time he no longer had control over its replay and was beginning to fantasize resurrecting Freddie Mercury and murdering him.

He just finished humming the forty-ninth rendition of Beelzebub putting aside a devil for him when the door opened. It swung against the wall next to him with a menacing clang, reverberating around the room for a solid second before dying away. The two Avengers squinted slightly in the light streaming in from the slightly-less-dimly-lit hallway and saw, silhouetted in the doorway, a tall, heavily muscled man with a sharp jaw and a sharper expression. At least seven others stood behind him in identical black tactical gear, an assortment of military-grade rifles and Hydra-made energy weapons slung over their shoulders.

Before any of them could react, Clint kicked the first man in the stomach and Natasha karate chopped his throat. He doubled over, gasping for breath, and two men behind him leapt in to take his place. Clint weaved around the barrel of his attacker’s gun and twisted it out of his hands before hitting him over the head with it. In the meantime, Natasha had thrown the other man’s gun aside and gave him a flying kick to the chest, simultaneously kicking another man who tried to push past the door with the others. She landed in the doorway and punched the next person in the nose while shoving her knee into his diaphragm, then pulled him close to shield against the remaining assailant’s bullets, now that she stood in the line of fire. Clint had elbowed another enemy in the gut, pushed him out the door into the spray of bullets, and swung his stolen gun against another’s skull with a loud _crack._ As Natasha got into position with her human shield, Clint flung his rifle at her. She caught it singlehandedly and quickly took care of the last person shooting at her in the hallway.

Natasha let her human shield slide to the floor, and both spies took a moment to collect their breath.

“I’ve… always wanted to do… something like that,” Clint panted, leaning against the hallway wall, “Just punch my way out of a cell.”

“Hush.”

Sooner than either of them would have liked, they heard the far-off sound of boots slapping against concrete, indicating their kidnappers had sent reinforcements. Judging by the sound and volume, Clint estimated twenty new guards. They snatched up a rifle each and took off running down the right-hand side of the hallway, away from the noise.

Now came the hard part: getting out of the building. Natasha would have liked to stay and learn more about the people running the place, but they both knew that wasn’t an option in this case. They had no idea where those people might be, or how many others might be guarding them, and right now the safest strategy—and the protocol for if they got caught—was to get out, send word to the Avengers, and wait for backup. And to do that, they needed to find the exit before the entire facility came after them. Natasha’s instinct, and the dampness of the walls, told her they were being held underground, but beyond that they knew nothing about the building.

They ducked around the nearest corner they came to and pressed their backs flat against the wall, holding the stolen rifles up by their shoulders. Clint, being closest to the hall where they came from, peeked slowly around the corner and held up a finger for Natasha, while she checked their hiding spot for more members of Hydra coming from the adjoining hall.

As the footsteps grew nearer and louder, Clint eased his head back out of sight, until only the tiniest sliver of his nose was visible from the main hallway. The instant he saw the first booted foot round the far end of the corner he slipped out of sight again and flashed two numbers at Natasha on his hand. Two and four: twenty-four seconds. They counted down in silence, listening to the sound of their pursuers’ footsteps echoing off the walls.

He timed it perfectly. Just as the count hit zero, the first few guards reached their hallway. Natasha and Clint leaped in front of them and opened fire, raining bullets at  the legs of the panicked crowd with abandon.

And then the mêlée began. Quickly, before they lost the element of surprise, the spies leapt into the fray, kicking and punching at anything that moved, each fighting at least three people at once. Natasha wound her legs around one guard’s neck while using her arms to twist another in the path of an energy blast, which in turn caused the shooter to trip over himself and allowed Clint to knock him out with the butt of his gun. Clint kicked a guard in the teeth, punched someone else in the eye, slammed their heads together, and shoved one at a man trying to shoot Natasha. The other was used as a shield, before he shot the man targeting him and kicked the body against another couple guards. Natasha emptied her clip into three more guards and discarded it by smashing its end into a fourth’s jaw, using the momentum to swing herself through the air and kick above Clint’s ducked head at a man about to shoot him in the back. Some of the injured guards had pulled themselves back on their feet and tried to rush at Natasha, but she slid across the ground and knocked the ankles out from one of them, leaving Clint to shoot the rest. The fallen guard scrambled to get back up, but was cut down by Natasha’s quick kick to the underside of his jaw as she leapt back to her own feet.

All around them, guards dropped like dominoes, and each time they fell fewer and fewer got up again, until finally there was only one left standing. The man cowered by the wall, his knuckles white around his gun as he jerkily swung it from Clint to Natasha and back again. Natasha took a slow, deliberate step forward. He took a step back.

In Clint’s many years as a professional spy he had come to learn that all cannon fodder goons of evil organizations—whether Hydra, or A.I.M., or Chitauri aliens—were essentially the same people. And when faced with Hawkeye and Black Widow in her deadliest prey-stalking mode after watching the two take down an entire crew of attackers, they all did what boiled down to the same thing.

This one had backed up so far he was practically pressed against the wall. His face was ghost white, and sweat glistened on his skin. He puffed out his chest and planted his feet shoulder length apart to appear more threatening, but the whites of his eyes betrayed his terror, and his feet were better positioned to flee than to stand and fight.

“Don’t come any closer!” he shouted, his eyes darting with his rifle from one Avenger to the other, “I—I’ll shoot!”

“No you won’t,” Natasha smiled a cold, predatory grin. She took another step forward, and the guard’s rifle clattered to the ground.

Another thing Clint knew about these people: they rarely cared about whatever cause they claimed to serve. Not enough to make sacrifices.

“Tell us exactly what we want to know, and we won’t kill you,” Natasha purred in the guard’s ear.

Five minutes later they were gone.


	3. Sewers are Sh*t

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where language barriers are important.

In a tiny little town in Latveria, two blocks behind an old factory with a suspiciously higher than average energy output, there was a street. On that street there was a manhole cover. And standing at a cart nearby the manhole cover was a poor Latverian farmer trying to sell his wares to an empty street. No customers had come by in over six hours, but this was where he had always set up his cart, and where his father had before him. Nothing would move him from this spot so long as he lived, no matter if the men from the factory had already scared off all the customers.

The farmer sat twiddling his thumbs behind his stand, like he had for weeks now, when something happened that hadn’t before, not since the factory workers chased away the other venders: he heard a voice.

Specifically, he heard a metallic clang and then a loud swear, followed by another voice muttering angrily in what sounded like Russian. What most concerned the farmer, however, was that it appeared to come from underground. The farmer wondered if he was going insane.

There was another clang, a few more curses, and a shrill scraping sound before, suddenly, the rusty metal cover popped off the manhole. A hand appeared from underneath and slowly pushed it aside. Right before the farmer’s eyes, a man crawled out of the hole and stood panting beside it with his hands on his knees. His dirty blond hair and dark factory uniform were splattered with things the farmer would rather not think about, and to make the situation even stranger, a sleek bow was slung across the man’s back.

“I hate sewers,” he spat in English. He faced the other end of the street, so the farmer doubted the man had seen him yet.

From the depths of the manhole, a woman shouted, “You already made that explicitly clear after the first thirty times you told me.” Her echoing voice was accompanied by various grunts and more scraping sounds, like cloth rubbing up against the hole’s inner wall.

“Would you rather I kept singing Bohemian Rhapsody?” the man asked, closely examining his weapon, “Aw, bow. Widow, there’s crap all over it. Literal crap. Man, I _hate_ sewers!”

“You should’ve left it in the bag,” the woman said.

He ignored her. “This is my best bow, and it’s all filthy now.”

“We can wash it when we get back.”

“Yeah, but it won’t be the same, and Stark’ll try and fancy it up again. He’ll probably make it float, or shoot by itself. I can’t use that!”

“Quit—oof—whining, Hawkeye,” the woman grunted. Her voice grew louder and clearer as they talked, until, with one final grunt, a large sack flew out of the hole. The man wrinkled his nose at the amount of gunk coating the bag and gingerly pulled a full quiver of arrows and a small handgun from its depths, while a dirty head of red curls emerged from the manhole. He tried to hand her the gun, but she didn’t even look at him. She had seen the farmer, staring wide-eyed at the weapon in the man’s hand. As soon as the man noticed her line of sight, he spun around and swore again.

“Were you here the whole time?” he asked.

The farmer blinked.

“Do you speak English?” the woman asked.

The farmer finally remembered how to move and shakily raised an arm to point at the gun, babbling in terror. The man’s eyes grew wide as he glanced from the farmer’s hand to the gun in his own.

“Futz, this looks bad. Sorry!” the man threw his hands up and stuffed the gun back in the sack, “Look. Look, I’m putting it away. We’re friendly.” The grin he flashed the farmer looked more guilty than friendly, and would have done nothing to persuade the farmer even if he could understand the language.

When he failed to look reassured, the woman stepped in front of her friend and spoke in Latverian. “Please, this isn’t what it looks like.”

 

* * *

 

“My name is Nancy, and this is Carl,” Natasha pointed, “We’re being chased by some men—”

Before she could say anything more the farmer’s face lit up in apparent understanding, and he started talking animatedly again, waving his arms around and pointing off to his right.

“Um…” Natasha shook her head, struggling to follow the fast paced Latverian, “Are you—the factory? Is that what you’re saying? You know about the people in the factory?” The farmer nodded. “Then you’ll know why we might need to get away from them, quickly?” Again, he nodded.

Natasha opened her mouth to press him further, but he silenced her with a beckoning wave of his hand. He turned around and started walking, glancing once over his shoulder and flashed a friendly, gap-toothed smile when he realized they hadn’t moved. The spies exchanged wary glances. Finally, Natasha shrugged and began following him. Clint heaved the bag full of their recovered weapons over his shoulder before jogging after them. As they reached the end of the street he caught up, falling into step next to Natasha with familiar ease.

“Nat, what’s going on?” he whispered into her ear, making sure they were far enough behind that the farmer couldn’t hear.

“We’re following this guy someplace safe, so we won’t get caught. He didn’t say where,” she replied.

“And we’re just trusting him not to turn us in?”

“Do you have a better option?” Natasha pointed out, “Besides, I think he genuinely wants to help us. You know how well I read people, even if I can barely understand him.”

“I thought you knew Latverian,” Clint asked.

Natasha sighed. “I do, but it’s a little shaky. He was talking too fast for me to process some of it, and he’s got a strange accent that I can’t figure out. I could only catch a couple words here and there.”

“So, you really have no clue what he said.”

“Yep.”

“He could be walking us straight into a trap, and you would have no idea.”

“Yep.”

And we’re just going to follow him and hope for the best.”

“Yep.”

A few seconds passed as they made their way down another deserted street in silence.

“You should probably get some more weapons out of that bag,” Natasha said.

“Yep.”


	4. Hawkeye, I've a Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where miscommunication is _very_ important.

Gradually, the farmer led them into a more lived-in area of the town, via winding streets and twisting alleyways that didn’t feel like they should connect up to each other, yet somehow did. Some people waved at them from open windows, while others side-eyed Nancy and Carl’s (stolen) Hydra uniforms with clear hostility.

The farmer couldn’t think of any reason why two guards from the factory wanted him to take them back to the factory’s front end, or what they could possibly be doing in that sewer. On the other hand, these appeared to be American guards, so the farmer supposed that was typical behavior where they came from. It would also explain why Carl didn’t seem to know a lick of Latverian, and why Nancy’s was so… well… terrible. When she first started speaking, it took the farmer a few seconds to realize she was using Standard Latverian, which was really only spoken in or around the capital, Doomstadt, and rarely seen this far out in the country, where local dialects dominated the language use. Normally the farmer could understand Standard Latverian at least clearly enough to hold a conversation in it, though it sounded to him the way Shakespearean English would to English speakers, but this woman’s accent had him baffled. It certainly wasn’t American—that much he could tell.

Many of his friends would balk at hearing he offered to help these people who had kicked them out of the market, but the farmer chose to view it as an opportunity. Previously, when the other venders had tried protesting their eviction, they were met only by jeers from the factory workers before getting thrown out again, or on one occasion, shot down. No one tried actively protesting after that happened.

Now, the farmer hoped that by helping these two new workers (and he assumed they had to be new to not know their way around town yet) find their way back to the factory entrance, it would at least give him the chance to speak to someone there without being immediately dismissed. Perhaps they would be more inclined to listen to him if he approached them from a position of kindness, rather than in an angry mob with rotten fruit.

* * *

 

“Is it just me, or is there something profoundly wrong about this place?” Clint whispered as they made their way through another crooked street behind the farmer.

“It’s not just you,” Natasha whispered back, eyeing their surroundings suspiciously. This place made her nervous, though she would never admit it to anyone but Clint. The way the narrow streets caused otherwise average-sized brick buildings to loom menacingly above their heads and cast dark shadows over everything gave her a crushing sense of claustrophobia, despite the fact that she had never suffered from it before. Her mind was trying to tell her that there was something off about this entire situation, if only she could put her finger on it. Something about the buildings, the architecture, felt wrong somehow; though adjoined structures were fairly common throughout Latveria, these were built with darker bricks than usual, and the shapes were strange as well. She was used to Latverian buildings being tall and narrow, but these were stockier than any building she had seen on this mission. The streets as well—they twisted and turned so erratically that, standing at one end of a street, she couldn’t see or even begin to guess in what direction the other end led. Even in the poorer districts of Doomstadt, where the streets could sometimes grow as narrow as these, they were never so winding.

“Hawkeye, I don’t think we’re in the capital anymore,” Natasha concluded, “I think they took us to an entirely different city.”

“That’s what I was starting think too,” Clint said, squinting with his hand over his eyes above the buildings, where he could faintly see the tops of a distant mountain range, “The mountains are different. Closer.”

“So are we further south, or way up north?”

“No idea.”

As the two of them continued, it became increasingly difficult to know where they were headed, due to the same meandering nature of the streets that tipped them off to their change in location. The more their sense of direction deteriorated, the more uneasy and on edge they grew. They began trailing further and further behind their guide, exchanging whispered plans for contacting the Avengers and leaving. Occasionally, the farmer would turn around and wave them along.

“Nat,” Clint eventually said, “I don’t trust this guy anymore. There’s something fishy going on; I think it’s time we give him the slip…”

No sooner had he finished the sentence than they turned the next corner and saw, at the far end of the street, the very same building they just escaped from.

* * *

The farmer turned around as soon as he reached the right street, ready to pitch his idea to Nancy and Carl first, so they could potentially sway the rest in his favor. They entered the street, and the farmer sucked in a breath to speak.

“For fuck’s sake!” Carl snapped immediately upon seeing the factory, stopping the farmer in his tracks. He may not have understood the words, but the tone was impossible to misinterpret.

Then, at the far end of the street, the two guards on duty caught sight of Nancy and Carl and began shouting. _These_ words _,_ the farmer could understand.

He began to wonder if he might have miscalculated.

When the unmistakable _ratatatatat_ of machinegun fire burst from the factory, and Nancy pulled what appeared to be a rocket launcher from Carl’s bag, the farmer slid silently into a back alley and was never heard from again by either Hydra or SHIELD.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On the lab table, the radio transceiver crackled, breaking both Bruce and Tony out of their science-induced trances. Their eyes snapped up in unison and found each other’s across the lab. Instantly, they both exploded into motion; Bruce lunged across a bench to grab it, and Tony vaulted over a table, skidding over its surface and nearly crashing to the floor. Bruce got there first.

“Tasha, are you okay?” he shouted into it before anyone on the other end could speak. Across the table, Tony made frantic hand motions and mouthed commands to ask where they were.

“It’s Clint actually, but thanks for the concern,” came the breathless reply. “I’m fine. Nat’s fine. Everything’s peachy.” In the background, Bruce heard what sounded like an explosion.

“We’ve been worried sick ever since you didn’t check in. What happened? Where are you? Where’s Nat? We’ll come get you,” he said in a single breath. Tony ordered JARVIS to trace Clint’s signal and whipped out his phone to call Steve.

“Kidnapped. Not a clue. Taking on an entire cell of Hydra singlehandedly with a rocket launcher,” Clint answered. His voice sounded flippant, but for anyone who knew him well enough his strained undertone, barely audible over the sound of gunfire, was clear enough. “Hey, fun fact: did you know you can make a radio transmitter out of cannibalized parts from three different Hydra w— _FUTZ_!” Another deafening explosion, this one far louder and far closer-sounding than the last, cut off his sentence. Then silence.

Bruce froze. Tony slowly lowered his phone. 


	5. We Need a Plan. One That Goes Further Than Punching Everyone.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where things go boom.

The goons from the factory probably never expected Hawkeye and Black Widow to last quite so long after the battle began. Even with all the rumors and stories told in half-whispers with no one else around, they still found inexperienced villains who made the mistake of underestimating the two lone humans in this new age of superheroes, and Hydra, for all its intelligence, fell too easily into that trap.

An hour in and neither Avenger showed signs of giving up, though they fought tooth and nail against the oncoming rush of Hydra soldiers. Natasha lost her rocket launcher and gained a new one. Clint went through nearly every trick arrow in his quiver and began lobbing grenades from their stolen weapon stash, and all the while, they booked a strategic retreat back down the winding streets and alleys, knowing no amount of underestimation could save them if Hydra managed to surround them.

They couldn’t keep running forever, and they knew it.

Natasha’s eyes darted from one spot to the next as she fired the rocket launcher, constantly assessing and reassessing their situation for the slightest advantage. She processed their surroundings in the only way she could in a battle so fast-paced: in quick flashes. Glimpses that connected to other glimpses that combined to form a fluid picture. Freeze-frame snapshots with all the unimportant details filtered out. Here, she saw two black clad men rushing at her: one with a weak knee and a nearly imperceptible limp, the other a tad on the short side. Natasha swiped her leg behind the first man’s weak knee, and he dropped to the ground. She smashed her rocket launcher into his sternum and vaulted over it, instinctively adjusting her weight distribution to slam her feet into the second attacker’s skull. The moment she hit the ground, she hefted the rocket launcher up in a wide arc, swinging it into another group of assailants, bowling them over. She ducked, dropped the rocket launcher, and rolled between them, dodging a spray of bullets from a woman she spotted while in the air. Between her arms, Natasha saw a flash of a man’s fingers scrambling for a discarded energy weapon, before her somersault took the image away. Another flash: a thin, crooked staircase clinging to the side of a building.

She got an idea.

“Hawk, your three o’clock!” she shouted as she leapt out of the roll, ever aware of her partner’s position. She stomped on the wandering fingers and snatched up the gun.

Clint glanced up from twisting his bowstring around a woman’s neck and gave a curt nod, not caring if Natasha saw it because he knew she didn’t need to. He threw the woman off himself as she lost consciousness, and one arm uppercut a man in the chin while the other arm pulled one of his last trick arrows from his quiver. With a quick check of the label, he smashed the bulb on another attacker’s head.

Blinding smoke billowed from the arrowhead, and without any need for communication, Clint and Natasha sprinted toward the staircase, using memory to guide them through the throng of agents. They reached the bottom of the stairs with the fringes of the smoke cloud, grabbing more weapons on their way. In the confusion created by Clint’s trick arrow, no one noticed as they silently made their way up the stairs and onto the roof.

“You got a plan?” Clint whispered as he took a quick inventory of his remaining arrows.

“No,” Natasha admitted. “We’ve got to block that off.” She pointed to a stairwell in the middle of the roof that accessed the lower floors.

“A good blast with that rocket launcher might do the trick,” Clint said. They didn’t have to run the risk of civilians getting hurt in the explosion, since they were still in the area surrounding the factory that Hydra cleared out.

“Or it could bring the entire building down around us.”

“That too.”

They stood for a second in silence, minds racing yet still alert to every sound and movement in case Hydra had found them again.

“We gotta get out of here Nat,” Clint sighed, “Cooper’s fifth grade graduation is in two weeks. We can’t miss that just ‘cause we’re dead.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said, though she had barely heard what Clint said. Her mind was still trying to work out an end to their situation that didn’t involve one or both of their deaths. “Hey,” she nodded at the Hydra energy gun in Clint’s hands with a sly grin, “You remember Monte Carlo?”

Clint glanced down and back at her. “You think…?”

“If it’s got a computer chip…”

“That’s a big if.”

“It has enough high-tech button gizmos. Just maybe…”

“I’m on it,” Clint grinned, “You worry about not getting our asses killed in the meantime.”

Clint set himself up in the corner farthest from any entry point and set to work dismantling his energy weapon, humming anxiously to himself about silhouettos as he worked, while Natasha stood between the two sets of stairs. She made sure to position herself where she had a good view of both the stairs and the street where Hydra was rapidly reorganizing. She set down her rocket launcher and hefted another energy weapon onto her shoulder, deciding to take her own advice and avoid possibly blowing up the building.

Meanwhile, the Hydra agents had finally put two and two together to figure out where the Avengers had escaped too, and one woman in the center of the group was waving her arms, directing people up the stairs. Natasha carefully lined up her sights and fired straight at her.

The crowd scattered like ants from a kicked anthill. A few made it to the stairs, where Natasha easily picked them off, but most ran in the opposite direction of the building, which suited Natasha’s needs precisely. As she waited for them to regroup again, she added, with a weary sigh, four more dripping red marks to her mental tally.

 _“It’s either us or them, Natalia,”_ she whispered to herself.

“Got it!” Clint shouted, waving a mess of wires and circuits above his head.

“Great, get the eta quick,” she said, eyeing a group of Hydra agents gathering just outside the range of her weapon, “I don’t know how much time we’ve got here.”

Natasha listened with one ear to Clint’s conversation with the Tower, while the majority of her attention focused on the people in black tactical gear trying to kill them. They all seemed to crowd around one person, and from what Natasha could see through the shifting bodies, there was something heavy in that person’s hands. Metallic. Weapon-like. She fired off a warning shot to startle them into giving her a better line of sight, but with no such luck.

Behind her, Clint told Bruce about their situation.

At a silent command from their new leader, the Hydra agents parted to let him through, and Natasha could finally see what he was holding: another rocket launcher, glowing ominously in places with the same blue light that designated Hydra’s energy weapons.

“Clint, look out!” Natasha screamed. She barely had time to throw herself to the ground before the world went white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can probably tell, I know nothing about radios, so... *handwave*


	6. Caught In a Landslide, No Escape From Reality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The one where things go bigger boom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really short chapter this time, but it didn't really fit into what I've got planned for the next one.

Consciousness fluttered on the edges of her awareness, nudging her awake with a nagging insistence that something important… something… She had to do something…

She couldn’t quite think…

The world was collapsing around her. Everything crashing, crumbling. She felts herself being tossed, like a pinball, through space and darkness, as rubble pummeled her from every side.

She woke screaming when a chunk of mortar the size of her head slammed into her calf. Gritting her teeth through the pain, she forced her surroundings into focus. Dust clogged the air and deadened all sound, obscuring anything further than three feet away in a haze the color of dry clay. She laid on an uneven heap of rubble that stretched beyond the edge of her limited sight.

Her training kicked in before her memory, and she twisted her head around to assess the damage to her leg.

Instead, her eyes were drawn to a splash of crimson spreading a few feet from her hand. She followed its path up… and up… to a pale, limp hand peeking out from under a concrete slab.

A single thought shot through the fog of her mind, the first thing she’d known with clarity since whatever put her in this situation:

_Clint._

_Oh no._


End file.
